Scipionyx samniticus
Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 21:33:48 PDT
To: NAMI/TAC Correspondent
From: "Andrew Phelps" <phelps@cwnet.com>
Subject: rationality

I wrote:
“How come you can advocate a fractured, punishment- and control-oriented solution like AB 1800?”
In response:
“Why must this come back to and conclude with AB1800? For me, treatment mechanisms like AB1800 are for when someone becomes unable to make rational decisions and is completely overcome by their illness.”
This is a judgment call. Many of us myself included have been judged ‘irrational’ and subjected to psychiatric intervention because somebody else doesn’t ‘get’ what we are about. Plus there are schools of psychiatry like that of Harry S. Sullivan who basically argue that even when people are ‘floridly’ irrational there is an inner core of rationality with which circumstance/social process has failed to connect. Sullivan made his name BTW by a stint in an asylum where he had an ‘astonishingly high’ cure rate for ‘schizophrenics’.
“My line of thought here is to what should happen when a person can make rational treatment decisions (regardless of whether any previous intervention was beneficial or detrimental).”
Ah! But I place a high value on Vision & creativity.

My point has to do with the nature of ‘rationality’. As I said elsewhere, Francis Bacon developed that question in Western thought. In his Novum organum he identifies four basic kinds of illusions (he calls them ‘idols’) which lead to confusion about what is rational and what is not. For the record, these are called, ‘Idols of the Tribe’, ‘Idols of the Cave’, ‘Idols of the Market-place’, and ‘Idols of the Theatre’. [I:xxxix] For me the advocacy for extending the realm of forced treatment (currently located in CA in AB 1800) seems to be quite irrational. The reason I ‘come back to’ AB 1800 is that my own personal sense is that your reasons are not rational by my standards. They are however different than those of others advocated on this list .. to each, I must reflect differently what I see in them. It is kind of intrusive to fuss directly with people about things like this, so I tend to be hang loose and take from people what they want to give. But somewhere about this point in the conversation I feel I should say in a general way what I think.

The ‘medicalisation’ of reality falls back on the word ‘illness’, from ON ilre, meaning ‘wicked’. This is an idol of the tribe, in the sense that it “distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its [society’s] own nature with them.” [I:xli] The belief that one has a special ground to judge others ‘irrational’ is more like an idol of the cave, whereas “the spirit of man .. is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation,” and depends on “impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind, preoccupied and predisposed or .. indifferent and settled.” [I:xlii] Then there is the idea that the object is ‘helping’ via ‘treatment’, which falls more as an idol of the market-place, where the “ill and unfit choice of words .. plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion.” [I:xliii] And finally there are views like the ideal of ‘objectivity’, which to my mind/insight constitutes an idol of the theatre, the kind which “have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration.” [I:xliv]

For the society to respect us, the clients, more, it must become more self-reflective about what is reasonable and what is not. The ‘illusions’ I see here however seem scarcely to be self-reflective at all. And they have been instrumental over quite a long period of time in producing for myself and many others I know both injury and distraction from the real business of working through the problematic of madness.

I ‘come back’ to the politics because it keeps me mindful of why I put out like this. I am glad to have had the chance to put some of these thoughts to pen/keyboard, and I thank you for that. Your present purposes are antagonistic to mine, but perhaps some day you will get a warm glimpse of what I think I’m saying.

Andrew Phelps